Imagine you are in a meadow on a sunny day. You’re surrounded by sunflowers, wildflowers, and dandelions.
The air is sweet with the smell of blossoms and noisy with buzzing bees. Thousands of them are hard at work. They’re gathering nectar and pollen for the hive. As they go, they spread some of the pollen from plant to plant.
The color and smell of flowers attracts bees and other insects. Pollen is the powdery yellow stuff inside flower blossoms. It holds male reproductive cells. When a bee lands on a flower, pollen sticks to its body. Then it buzzes over to the next flower. There, the pollen sticks to that flower’s female cells. This joining of male and female cells is called fertilization. Without fertilization, new plants or flowers could not grow.
A bee sucks up nectar with its tongue. It takes the nectar back to the hive to be used for making honey. Then it flies right back out again. Honeybees visit 60,000 to 90,000 flowers to get enough nectar to make just a thimbleful of honey. No wonder people say “busy as a bee”!
